Tarkovsky may have known that “The Sacrifice” would be his last film, but it would be trite to say that he was putting himself up on screen as its tragic hero. Certainly the filmmaker would not deny a common bond with that man. Both are confronting the hour of their death.
I think what the filmmaker was revealing about his own personal drama, coping with terminal illness, was that he felt like the wrong side was dying. Their reputations were made off of his. His critics were a cancer, not him. They claimed his work as justification for their own and were forever trying to rebuild his art in their image.
But in Tarkovsky’s universe there surely should be some sort of natural law to spare the poet before the critic. At the same time, I can understand where any dying man might entertain the hope, wish, fantasy, whatever you call it, that a sacrifice of sufficient magnitude should bring about salvation for his loved ones. Here, I believe, is the common coordinate point where Alexander the main character of “The Sacrifice” and Andre, the director’s, predicaments overlap.
“The Sacrifice” it’s about WWIII and the hero is an aging intellectual, not some hunky, wisecracking superstar in a carnival costume. Even more interesting, this one’s a film critic. In the last act, the critic barters his reputation and all his material possessions away, to God, in exchange for the salvation of his loved ones. Then he sneaks off and sleeps with a witch. Next morning, we can’t possibly guess which desperate act did the trick, but something did. One senses it was a bit of both. In any case, in the end, his family is spared and Alexander has to fulfill his part of the bargain.
It appears as if Tarkovsky means to humble his critics, but in the end, a critic, saves the world? Consider how he did it. By giving up his reputation and all that it bought for him. Ironically, the message becomes that a critic’s highest achievement is to censor them self. The filmmaker sends this poor slob out into the world homeless, mute, stripped of reputation, literally escorted out of the picture by the men in white coats. With the great conflagration at the end of his movie, one could conclude Tarkovsky’s dying wish, at least as an artist, was to burn those critical voices out of existence.
The opening title cards of “The Sacrifice” play over a detail in a reproduction of an unfinished painting “Adoration of the Magi,” by Leonardo. Meanwhile, we listen to The “St. Mathew’s Passion” by Bach. As the titles conclude, the squeal of seagulls fades up. Eventually it will become evident that we are in an upstairs room in Alexander’s Swedish seaside sanctuary. For now, the camera cranes up on a lushly depicted tree in the painting, on a wall. The tree towers over the rest of the composition. The action cuts from that image of a tree, to an actual tree by the seashore, where seagull sounds make more sense.
Already, we are being invited to distinguish between a picture of a tree and an actual tree, Painter René Magritte did a similar thing with a pipe and caption in his “The Treachery of Images,” (1935).
After a few more frames, we will be supplied with the story of a tree to add to the equation, in order to thoroughly uproot any preconception that art is interchangeable with the things it presents. Besides a preview of the end of the world, we are being availed of an opportunity to challenge our preconceptions in a way that only cinema can supply.
It’s Alexander’s birthday and with the help of a very young boy whom everyone calls Little Man, an old man planting a barren tree by the sea. The little one is too young to comprehend a story the old one is telling. It’s about an elder monk that plants a barren trunk with his protégé. After much nurturing by his pupil, the monk’s tree eventually blossoms.
Alexander concludes his monk’s tale with a digression on how a method or a system can be applied to change virtually anything. No matter how insignificant an action is, if done consistently with focused intent, it will change the world. He proposes, one could simply rise up out of bed at precisely the same hour every morning, draw a glass of water from the sink, flush it down the toilet and that would tip the scales of change.
Smells positively Zen-like on the surface, but with a peculiar after scent. I’m almost certain it is a veiled insult, mocking censors who prefer their own idly formulated prejudices over an artist’s hard fought insights. Andre strikes back, making one of them admit how absurd their occupation really is. I didn’t fit these frames together until after I’d watched the film three or four times.
Tarkovsky endured the misunderstanding of men like Alexander throughout his career. Still he got up out of bed every morning, turned on his imagination and made one world-changing work of art after the other. Whatever his censors perpetrated against him, in his final film he flushes all their efforts down the drain.
Will we be forced to cut our losses with planet Earth altogether and bond completely with high technology in order to survive? That leaf drifting downstream in frame one of “Solaris” (1972) contains the entire conundrum. Tarkovsky continues to riff on the natural world’s virtues with his third film.
All his films contain poignant ruminations on war and apocalypse. In this one, the spacelab’s declared mission is to evaluate the planet Solaris for exploitable resources. As it turns out, the main character mines a treasure of human potential onboard the ship, even though it is exactly the opposite of his orders.
To bring a previous subject in this movie marathon forward, let us consider, briefly, that Hari represents the problem of conscience. Hari’s first close-up is extreme. We pull back slowly. She puts a hair comb up to her cheek, hinting that she is some artifact combed out of Kris’s past, but nothing could prepare Kris for the shattering his ego receives next. If Hari is conscience, then the planet Solaris is God, or else a much more highly evolved intelligence than our own. Whatever you call it, close contact with its ocean forces Earth’s finest psychologist’s unresolved issues to the surface.
Everyone take a breather before moving on. Go to the support materials on disk B of the Criterion release (2011) and watch the documentary interviews of Vadim Yusov who, more than anyone else, helped the director realize his vision. Then watch Natalya Bonderchuck, who played the role of Hari when she was barely eighteen and went on to act in over 40 roles, declare “Solaris is my favorite film.”
It’s the same sort of sentiment you’ll hear from Vadim Yusov, the man behind the lens that helped juggle the literal and abstract so visually in “Solaris.” If you get hooked on this stuff as I have, you will also find your way to the interview of the film’s composer Eduard Artemyev. Just about everyone in Tarkovsky’s crew talks as though they were of one mind with the director.
Madam Banderchuck goes on to recount a meeting of Tarkovsky’s closest admirers at a film fest in which all of Tarkovsky’s titles were shown over a few short days. “It was like watching a single film…all…about Andrei Tarkovsky.” “When it was over we didn’t want to leave,” she enthuses.
I didn’t personally know the man so, for me, his movies are about the ideas and implications embedded in his images. That is what we’ve been endeavoring to analyze.
Thanks to modern preservation and distribution, I too am able to watch all of Tarkovsky’s films in succession. We’ve been on a Tarkovsky pilgrimage for almost a year now and I don’t want to leave. If you enjoy returning to this same well often, as I do, you can own his entire output for something like $200 even if you’re paying retail.
In “Solaris,” a hotly hued leaf glides through the opening frame. It looks alive as it floats along propelled by the stream. Feast your eyes on that grass below, undulating and green. But, unlike what’s thriving underneath, the leaf is detached from its source, adrift; similar to the way Hari arrives on the scene, drawn back up to the surface by the misty, wet, heavenly abode of Solaris.
Kris is the man they sent up there to take charge of the mission, yet he is confronted with the unfinished business of his past. First, he tries to get rid of her, then he falls head over heels. Grief and denial are wed each time this space shrink’s deceased wife manifests. He wants to take her back to Earth with her, yet ignorance never quite adds up to bliss.
Hari comes to understand she’s just a facsimile but claims she’s gaining authenticity. What an exquisite performance she gives strutting between the two male doctors with that horned tribal mask frowning on the back wall in the background. Indeed, there is never a time she appears more like one of us but she’s merely a mask over Kelvin’s conscience, a disguised deity if you will, a Solaristic apparition, resuscitated in the present from living memory.
In Tarkovsky’s cinematic language, which he calls sculpting in time, we race to outer space like we we’re surrendering to the pull of greater forces, as the leaf does and partly also out of sheer exuberance, like the horse does. But we also do it out of fear, like the child sprinting away from the horse in the same sequence. Whatever the motivation for this race, you can’t elude your emotional baggage on earth or in outer space.
I have not read any other analysis of these film. I simply watch each one a few times, then record my impressions. However, I recently began reading “Sculpting in Time” (1986), Tarkovsky’s compelling journal about art and film making. In it he outlines many of his theories on how cinema has its own poetic language. It is an art form entirely distinct from music, painting or lit, despite the fact that almost every other filmmaker makes a crutch of it.
Tarkovsky’s writing reminds me of a book I read decades ago called “Architecture for the Poor,” by Hassan Fathy. Both men are authors of such deep humanity, I recommend them whether you are interested in their subjects or not.
Tarkovsky’s book confirmed many things. Most of the subjects, themes and ideas that I have discussed in these posts turn out to be addressed in his writings. Part of what has been so satisfying about diving into his art has been being able to make sense of the films after repeated watching and writing, when much of them seemed so impenetrable to me at first.
After more than a year of constant analysis we’re about to move on.The final film in our series on Tarkovsky is “Stalker” (1979), which turned out to be his last film made in the USSR. When you watch his movies, or become familiar with the work of Russian masters, it is hard to understand why Russians and Americans are so often portrayed as enemies. Who can become acquainted with the likes of Stravinsky, Dostoevsky, Chagall, Chekov and Tarkovsky and not be moved. One would expect such countrymen to be our natural friend. Why should we want to be at odds with them?
Here is where world cinema comes in. What better way for Americans of average education and limited economic means, like myself, to obtain an accurate understanding of foreigners and their lands than by watching their films. We can’t all afford to be world travelers. So the world’s greatest artists, from every country, keep pushing the boundaries of their art form, giving their audience a far more accurate assessment of our potential relations than other media sources.
We should make it public policy to turn off the TV and view the flicks of our so-called opponents on the global stage, particularly those countries with which we are most polarized. It would straighten out our thinking on a mass scale about the supposed chasm that divides us. World cinema makes the case that Americans and Russians, for instance, do not have big differences. Films help us see how the little differences make us better allies than adversaries.
In thinking about what to zoom in on next, I am contemplating a survey of movies made by our present day so-called enemies. I’m talking about nations of people, not gangs of thugs, which can be found in every country. Film is the antidote to such animosity. A motion picture can have the opposite effect of a gun.
In counterpoint to what we are told about Russia on the evening news, think of their indelible cultural contributions. Their arts and sciences give more than enough proof that Russians are among the greatest pathfinders, poets, philosophers and prophets in history. Likewise, masterworks by filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Paradjonov, Konchalovsky and Shepitko convince me we have more in common than not.
For example, I would have felt honored to have a friend such as the hero Ivan from Tarkovsky’s first film “Ivan’s Childhood,” Just like the army officers in the story who loved and protected him, I could never have mistaken him for an enemy.
My heart went out to Sotnikov in Shepitko’s “The Ascent” (1977) as well. He was not perfect, nor was his sacrifice. Who doesn’t relate to that?
I bring up “The Ascent” again because it was released in 1977. Shepitko is it’s director. My favorite woman director of all time. She and Tarkovsky were friends. They were both rising stars. Larissa was a first-class artist of the Soviet era, also a student of the same teacher, Mikhail Romm. Both would have been aware of being their mentor’s favorite students. Ever since those days, there was a friendly competition going on between them.
Production on ”Stalker“ was begun at relatively the same time period as “The Ascent” but the entire first year of shooting on the film was destroyed and Tarkovsky’s fifth and greatest film almost miscarried. I chose to focus on this one last, because of this complicated twist of fate, and also, because I like “Stalker” the best. In fact “Stalker” may be my favorite film, period.
Incidentally, actor Anatoly Solenitzyn performs in both “Stalker” and “The Ascent.” Let me confess, I disagree with Tarkovsky completely on one thing. He publicly dissed Larissa Shepitko’s film for being possessed of some lame performances. Tarkovsky was out of line. The acting is fine in “The Ascent.”
I have a theory. Since the Soviet critics were supportive of Shepitko’s film, Tarkovsky was compelled to belittle it. They submitted “The Ascent” to the Motion Picture Academy for the Best Foreign film. That should have been Andre’s honor, except for a botched film development process that resulted in critical loss. As it turned out “Stalker” wasn’t released until two years later.
Think of it. The film had to be funded and shot twice, which must have been an utter slog. But, fortunately, by then, the director, actors and their stories were are a lot further along into the emotional arc than they had been. A sense of maturity set in. It had to have felt totally stressful at the time, but the result is something sublime. Both were tests of Tarkovsky’s resolve. He and his cohorts somehow rose to the call.
The movie he made that year was as good as any movie ever made. It just so happened to cost him his life but that’s a story that has been told elsewhere. It would be a sin to pity him. Even though he died at 54, he lives on. Time is sculpt able. No one knows that better than Tarkovsky.
He doesn’t just sculpt with time in “The Stalker,” he railroads it into alternate dimensions. I agree with his assessment that very few filmmakers seem to be interested in exploiting the unique power of cinema. Not to the degree he does anyway.
Examining the opening of the seventh and final title in our series, “Stalker” (1977), the sound of a tumultuous train barrels through the soundtrack. It’s loud-ass presence contrasts incongruously with an overhead tracking shot, in a desolate bedroom, gazing down on a trio of figures in a bed. Middle-aged ma stares off camera in profile, she’s back to back with a head-scarved, adolescent who appears to be dreaming. Finally, the male figure comes to view with eyes cast sideward toward his daughter and wife.
The ramshackle flat begins to rumble and rattle. Not one of them acknowledges a thing. Gradually they are absorbed in an envelope of railroad racket. This radically retro, sepia and spinning whine of grotesquely swollen sound lashes up a mythical, moody dissonance that draws in our primitive sympathies.
Train clatter that would overwhelm normal sleep invades the soundtrack to such a degree now, the vibration causes a glass of water to skitter slightly across the seat of a wooden chair beside the bed. It makes you want to laugh, but then tragedy and comedy mesh, and you could weep for any child that has to sleep in such a mess.
Later, however, at the very last scene of the film, in fact, that same young girl appears to magically make household items slide across the table under their own power.
This little cinematic spell possesses a rich dream logic. The intense vibrations of the train passing make things in their apartment move involuntarily all the time. It was only a matter of time before a young girl would fantasize about being able to move them with her will.
To end the movie on Monkey (the young girl), whom we’ve been hardly more than introduced to, and to focus on her having a private moment that invites us to be swept up inside her imagination with, strikes me as a supremely poignant and beautiful conclusion.
What exhilaration to start out with, that little clip of existential wit. It’s a shame so few people I know have seen this flick.
So we will ease into the new subject with a cross-dissolve out of our 13-part series on seven of the greatest Russian films ever made and we will go on a quest for films from countries like North Korea, Afghanistan, China, Iran and Venezuela.
Be back soon,right after this, our enemies through the eyes of world cinema…
We continue with “Stalker” (1979) from last month as we gradually wind down the yearlong survey of films by Andre Tarkovsky. In the opening shots, after the introduction, we begin by pushing in through half-opened doors, but notice how we immediately find ourselves hovering over the face of the stalker’s wife before introducing the rest of the family. His daughter’s face will be the last to grace the screen at the finale.
The stalker’s family is of paramount importance to this story, even though they make up only a fraction of what we see and hear. It’s not his wretched living quarters next to the tracks nor that dismal drinking establishment in the shadow of the cooling stacks, but the man’s wife and child that bring him back. It becomes his heart’s desire to take them with him to The Zone.
It’s a sly touch of comedy to have such a lost clown lead a prominent scientist and a celebrated writer on an expedition into the unknown. The stalker is occasionally referred to by his companions as a “chinkgachook.” It translates as something like “restless soul” or “holy kook,”but he alone can provide safe haven through a place where, years back, on account of some cosmic fluke, nature rid itself of humans. Almost everyone who ever went in there since was lost.
This chingachook’s been there and back so many times he’s a master. Where you or I see a safe path, the chinkgachook sees traps. We can only comprehend the complications of the labyrinth we inhabit by watching him pilot his companions through its funky kinks and cul-de-sacs. Tarkovsky trusts his audience to feel and think. His synthesis of time, through sound and image, maximizes space for audiences to fill in lots of blanks.
There’s a fence around The Zone and guards won’t let anyone in. They won’t go in either; they wouldn’t dare. It’s like chutes and ladders in there. You risk hell in following a stalker’s advice, but if you make it, you’re a citizen for a spell in paradise.
Actually, The Zone is not pure bliss. Like our own biosphere, it is equidistant from extremes. The Zone is merely Nature coming back from the effects of industrial blight, but the fact that she’s been spoiled makes her all the more precious and delicate. As a composer does with counterpoint or a painter does with darks and lights, Tarkovsky ups the emotional pitch of his subject by depicting polar opposites.
Light as it sounds, something seems to be pressing down on everyone in The Zone. One can hardly hold oneself up and it hardly matters where you lie down. Even when it’s soaking wet, nobody minds. Pilgrims slog and scale about the bag-end of Eden wrestling with inner demons, eventually penetrating an abandoned power plant with serpentine tunnels, treacherous currents and murky crossings. It makes a compelling visual context for characters to self-isolate, conspire, then snap back to ordinary again after each of them confronts the pros and cons of their most private desire.
At times this movie calls to mind the mind-bending paradigms in tales by Castaneda and Borges. Ordinary reality cedes to the outrageous. Passage through The Zone is a struggle between feeling and numbness, spontaneity and habit, pressure and suction. Characters plunge into unconditional reality and must sink or swim. Stalker cautions his entourage to hang close to him and takes the responsibility seriously–almost mystically. Rumor has it some legendary stalker named Porcupine lost his only son.
Great story. Now set it aside and shift the emphasis to what most interested Tarkovsky, the thing he called “sculpting time,” or how he frames the stuff of Nature in space to achieve awe-inducing spells. The artist’s pet pursuit programs cinematic progressions and rests at fluctuating rates and intervals. “Time pressure” is how he relates. A breeze lifts vapor and dust through the landscape, turning it to liquid space; time itself becomes visible as backgrounds and foregrounds dislodge. Actors pause and pace, water drips, steam rises, the camera dips and dodges to a tempo in which life itself thrives and bathes.
There are no literal mirrors in “Stalker.” Instead, dried silt in an arid lake bed lofts into the air on sudden gusts and with this image Tarkovsky somehow epitomizes the sodden journey of three conflicted men, each confronting their deepest desire.
Like a dune in the wind, never appearing the same twice, reality is in continual shift and flux inside The Zone. In other words, these mens’ very presence irreversibly alters the balance of space; as human presence has always done, conquering wild places. I consider this cinematic sequence as enlightened a statement of our predicament as any ever attempted by anyone before or since.
“Stalker” was well received internationally but back home its director was harassed. I wonder, did the maestro make a conscious decision to do away entirely with the mirrors in this film in an effort to transcend them, or was it just coincidence? We began this series over a year ago with his third film called “Mirror,” a movie that got the most heat from his detractors. Not everyone liked what they saw in the looking glass. Its intensely personal subject matter put off some viewers while exhilarating others. Within the state-run movie system of the Soviet Union, the negative response to “Mirror” probably sealed Andre’s fate as an ex-pat in the future.
Mirrors were never limited to shiny glass in this director’s films anyway. They can be found in placid ponds or on burnished shields too. They are equally abundant in both metaphor and simile as well.
Looking in the mirror means taking personal responsibility–our most pressing business on the planet. Like the best of the great artists, Tarkovsky was an oracle overlaying an enlightened frame on the future, using every thing available to him to settle technology’s debt with nature.
We have been talking about Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 (2014). It’s been the better part of a year since the film’s release. Unless someone else has something to add, I will wrap up my analysis in this post. If I had to describe it to someone in a single line I’d say Vol. 2 unspools like one third act of contrition, another third true confession, shedding light in cracks on his persona, as well as a few embedded in the collective unconscious, and one third jabbing at the eyes of his audience.
Might as well digress at this important intersection, in regard to the most heinous images in the film. I keep ragging on about a reviewer in a local independent weekly that neglects the vital issues by simply pronouncing the movie “shit.” A more eloquent reviewer put it something like, “a singularly hateful two hours of movie watching.”Isn’t the issue how these images reverberate though culture over their lifetimes and in what ways they morph in meaning with age?
Imagine what an opportunity it is to make the first contact from your culture with a person from another completely different one. You are a doorway, their first impression, a shaper of his or her point of view. I ask myself, what kind of greeting or communication would befit such a privilege? I must confess, some self-righteous voice inside me answers, “Certainly not the ass-whipping we’re given in “Nymph()maniac Vol. 2.”
I will turn this question on the filmmaker, Lars Von Trier himself. What is your salutation to the world with these extreme scenarios in your latest release? Less educated people might not understand your illustrious cinematic ancestry, your omnivorous assimilation of art or rigorously Nordic conditioning. Did you keep in mind, when composing these frames, how the life of a one-eyed, illiterate, deaf, mute at the furthest outpost of the wired world might be changed?
Eventually the sequence of clips where your character Jo volunteers to be strapped to a sofa and savagely whipped may just take on a life of its own. That horrid little snippet could be stripped from your movie, maybe already has been, and be circulating like smack, among dark digital subcultures, touching down a million times more swiftly than our father’s girly magazines did last century.
I know, Maestro Von Trier, your heroine must be getting in touch with something very deep by asking for such punishment. We both hope you’re right-on about what kind of medicine your latest adventure in hyper-reality provides to millions of truth-starved, self-loathing, culture-shocked impressionable minds worldwide, don’t we? Because, there could be no excuse for being taken into their confidence and then poisoning them.
Over the lifetime of your movie in the digital universe, imagine all those that don’t speak any language at all, have never read a book or can’t, in any other way but literally, with eyes only, comprehend your artfully angled, eloquently sepia-toned intellectually ripe digressions? What’s the information contained in the image, stripped to its most basic? That’s your greeting to the world.
Sure, whenever the camera stops swaying and that eunuch and courtesan exchange gripes, they justify, in very mature and philosophical terms, the movie’s reason to be. Bravo! The night I went to see Vol 2, I couldn’t hear most of it because of sound problems in the theater, so all your talky second act was wasted, H. Von T. Without all that blabber it becomes a different movie altogether. Boo! Hiss!
You can’t control everything downstream of your creation, I grant you, but the image you make is your responsibility. As its maker, it has your intentions written all over it. What impression do you wish to leave behind and why, with that deranged footage of a woman’s bloody behind? I know its owner claims, in the last half of the last act, she might just be something God or nature put on earth in order to make society acknowledge its sickness, but who needs that? It’s what the nightly news is for.
The conclusion I took home is the girl can’t help it. She doesn’t know how to be normal and so she must accept herself as the other. A reluctant freak, she despises and belittles her embedded human failings because they are unfitting of the beast she identifies herself to be.
This is undoubtedly Von Trier’s most personal and confessional film to date. I find its purpose more fascinating than the film itself. We encounter his subject when she’s toying with her self-image as a misfit. She embraces being a monster but at the same time resents it.
Gifted storytellers have always helped illuminate dark passages for us. Does that make artists freaks or monsters? Does Von Trier’s provide us a harmless, relatively healthy scenario to help us as a society embrace our inner freak or does it plunge us more hopelessly into self-rejection? I trust that he’s well meaning, but again, if that is so, I wish he’d think more in terms of the antidote when glorying in the sickness. We absorb more than enough toxins from screens as it is.
As an example, a movie that portrays extreme disease as “Nymph()maniac,” but provides more of an antidote, is David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980). In place of graphic social deviance, in Von Trier’s film, we pan across directly to its grotesque physical twin in Mr. Lynch’s. The scene in which the beast becomes human is played with Dickensian sentimentality yet succeeds beautifully thanks to an acting duet tour de force between Anthony Hopkins as a compassionate doctor and John Hurt as the Elephant Man John Merrick. The exchange moves me to tears each time I witness this thing that resembles a giant corn fritter, as much as a human, turns out to be an intelligent, sensitive and lovingly-reared young man.
Antonin Artaud christened a trend in drama called the “Theater of Cruelty.” He popularized it, extolled its virtues and applied them to living. He also passed extended periods in an insane asylum. From inside hospital, at least, the Theater of Cruelty looked to a tonic for society’s ills.
Artaud’s instinct, it seems, was in conditioning the audience to push back, so we don’t loose that impulse and turn into hat racks. From that standpoint, I subscribe to the concept. Keep the muscle strong. Use it or loose it. But the counter-argument is, by subjecting ourselves to increasingly sensational experiences, in the movies and other entertainments, some of the audience will grow desensitized to violence, fall increasingly indifferent to moral order and ultimately become homicidal themselves in demand for the next big thrill.
I’m with Artaud, up to a certain point. In as much as drama is capable of it, I look for all sorts of ritualistic, shamanistic, initiatory possibilities in motion pictures, or any dramatic form. It has the potential to be good medicine. I think we need more of that.
I’ve never been surrounded by mental patients, nor the international media. Very likely Artaud and Von Trier know some things I don’t. I wonder, is “Nymph()maniac” supposed to work like some kind of homeopathic on the audience? With such a harsh lashing, Von Trier could be working toward a social cure, I suppose. In breaking the limits of our tolerance, he presumes to help us regurgitate something from the depths of the collective soul, shoving a finger down our throat, through our eyes, as it were. As a social study, I hope it works. At Vol 2’s climax, I chose to close mine.
In Vol 2, Jo offers a hypothesis poised as the existential crux of story and I paraphrase: “Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset; more spectacular colors when the sun hits the horizon. That’s perhaps my only sin.” When Jo confesses this, is this not the filmmaker here ruing his obsession with misanthropy?
Through his subject’s mouth, Von Trier bemoans having grown desensitized. A filmmaker is the archetypal magician, enchanter, seducer and creator of artificial realities. Some grow so accustomed to the hyper-reality, real life pales in comparison. An artist can become so wrapped up in artifice he gets addicted. We encourage this. The audience eats it up and pushes him ever further out in to space to find more. Call this, the filmmaker’s dilemma. We laugh about it again and again while watching that famous farce “8 ½.” by Fellini. In his hands, the impasse manages to warm the heart. In Lars Von Triers’ it breaks the skin.
Von Trier has courted controversy with his public personality while cultivating an illustrious reputation with his films. Let’s hope he will be remembered more for his cinematic contributions, than for being that naughty fool in the news.
